4
organization is.”
6
Tobitt, who in his private life is married to a black woman, mishears the
invisible man’s political speech about the impossibility of (fully?) institutionalizing the power of
any people as socially discriminatory.
Invisibility for Ellison is the social but not political perception of race, a condition in
which race is a conspicuous marker of social difference and an unnoticed sign of political
significance. Ellison figures race as political invisibility qua social hyper-visibility. Outside of
the political realm of speaking and acting equals, the invisible man hears the politically-marginal
speech of command, or worse yet, sees himself participate in violent struggles for social position.
When I say Invisible Man is a parable about race’s social-political duality, I mean that it presents
a puzzle about the polity to be unpacked. In what kind of world are the invisible man’s
experiences situated? It is a world shot through with racial conflicts in a variety of modalities:
social (as in the violent struggle for recognition), political (as when he gives an extemporaneous
speech that protests an elderly black couple’s eviction)
7
and private (as the narrator withdraws
from public life into the thoughts that open and close the book).
Danielle Allen’s “Invisible Citizens” takes up Arendt alongside Ellison to argue “both
used the metaphor of ‘invisibility’ to think through issues of injustice” but “each gave the idea of
invisibility a different valence. For Arendt, it symbolized exclusion. For Ellison, invisibility set
domination front and center.”
8
Allen goes on to outline Arendt’s “heroic” appraisal of action
which (supposedly) presents political activity as “the opposite of what we do as members of
society [defend group interests].” Against this background, Allen sketches Ellison’s “tragic”
vision of politics as revealing “the sacrifices citizens make for each other and the necessary
6
Ellison, Invisible Man 468-469.
7
Ellison, Invisible Man Ch. 13.
8
Danielle Allen, “Invisible Citizens,” Nomos XLVI: Political Exclusion and Domination, ed. Melissa Williams and
Stephen Macedo (New York: New York University, 2005) 32. It is more accurate to say that the defense of interests
is not what constitutes the political nature of any action for Arendt.
Convention